Kyoto Animation is one of Japan’s most famous anime studios. Besides its shows, the studio is famous for another thing: large eyes.

This piece originally appeared 10/21/15.

Many anime characters have abnormally large eyes. And many studios in Japan have their own house style. Kyoto Animation is no exception! What’s interesting is that the anime characters it creates often have similar eyes, hence the clever pun “Kyou Ani-Me” (京アニ目), which means, “Kyoto Animation Eyes.”

Huge eyes, of course, originally came to Japanese manga via the big-eyed characters found in highly influential Western cartoons, such as the work of Walt Disney and Max Fleischer. (Read here for more on the development and meaning of anime.)

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At this point, though, modern anime and manga are probably drawing more on dominant Japanese stylistic conventions than directly from, say, Betty Boop cartoons.